Van Gogh’s Color Schemes Served as Pie Charts

There are various ways to show a color scheme in diagrammatic form. One way is through the color gamut overlaid on the color wheel, as I’ve shown several times on this blog and in my book. That’s best for defining which color types are in and out of your scheme.


But it doesn’t let you know how much of each color is represented in the color scheme. To show that, you can graph the distribution of colors in a pie chart. Here’s one from Arthur Buxton’s blog. It converts 28 Van Gogh paintings into sector graphs showing the percentages of the five most common colors in each painting.

Warm colors in the dark yellow family predominate, often played against deep blues. Van Gogh doesn’t use much green, red or violet.

Working in reverse, from a set of pie chart to a series of pictures, this would be a useful method for film or graphic novel designers to plan color scripts.
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Arthur Buxton’s blog
via BoingBoing
suggested by John Harris and Susan Fox